ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the impact of registration laws on turnout, beginning with an overview of the history of the registration requirement in the United States. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward have argued that officials imposed registration requirements to selectively shape the composition of the electorate and thus played a key role in the demobilization of the working class and minorities in the early part of the twentieth century. Whether or not registration laws effectively reduced voting fraud, the personal registration requirement shifted responsibility for establishing a citizen's eligibility to vote from the state to the citizen. Based on an examination of states with National Voter Registration Act (NVRA)-type programs prior to the implementation of the federal law in 1995, Stephen Knack concluded that the driver's license provision of the reform was likely to have a greater impact on registration and turnout levels than either the mail-in or public agency provisions of the law.
